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No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald: review

In his wildest imaging George Orwell could never have imagined how humungous Big Brother would become by the beginning of the 21st century. His Thought Police clearly have nothing on the analysts at the U.S. government’s National Security Agency (NSA) whose ambition to know “everything about everyone worldwide” is a truly harrowing prospect — and a threat to democratic governance from Toronto to Tokyo to Toledo, Ohio.

That, in a nutshell, is the thesis advanced in journalist Glenn Greenwald’s gripping memoir of his role in the Edward Snowden Affair. The book is titled No Place to Hide, Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, and if you can only read one book during the dog days of summer, this is it. Greenwald’s opus truly is a cautionary tale about the perils of out-of-control government, a regimen where institutional transparency is viewed by our political masters as “so yesterday” — because it might spawn pushback from a public blissfully unaware of how a “surveillance state” manipulates their lives.

No Place to Hide reads like a political/journalistic thriller and the saga begins when Greenwald was contacted on April 18, 2013 by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras about “someone who claimed to have access to some extremely secret and incriminating documents about the U.S. government spying on its own citizens. . . and he wanted her to work with him on releasing and reporting them.” That someone, of course, is Snowden, presently portrayed as Public Enemy No. 1 in the U.S., but who is viewed by many as a fearless patriot who alerted his fellow citizens about a digitally-based leviathan state being created, stealthily.

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When Greenwald first met Snowden, he was dismayed. Instead of a disillusioned middle-aged burnt-out case Snowden was a 29-year-old. As Greenwald writes, “To see that the source of this astonishing cache of NSA material was a man so young was one of the most disorienting experiences I have ever had.”

What Greenwald wondered would motivate someone whose life was just beginning to risk everything — his personal liberty, for starters — for a cause, no matter how just. But the answer he received quieted such concerns. “The true measurement of a person’s worth isn’t what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs.”

What Snowden believed in passionately was the “right” of people to “privacy.” And what he also believed was that that right was under siege by the US government. After working at the NSA and one of its affiliates, Snowden concluded, “[the NSA] was building a system whose goal was the elimination of all privacy, globally. To make it so that no one could communicate electronically without the NSA being able to collect, store and analyze the communication.” Further he noted, “My sole motive is to inform the public as to what is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states — the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge.”

That surveillance is conducted through a series of programs that the Snowden archive documents in graphic detail. Among them, a program known as PRISM that allows the NSA to collect private communications from the world’s largest Internet companies. Another that orders all of America’s major telecoms to hand over their customers call data history.

When the PRISM story was published, the reaction was “explosive.” Notes Greenwald, “Moreover, it was international. Unlike telephone companies such as Verizon, which are generally based in one country, Internet companies are global. Billions of people all over the world — in countries on every continent — use Facebook, Gmail, Skype, and Yahoo! as a primary means of communication. To learn that these companies had entered into secret arrangements with the NSA to provide access to their customers’ communications was globally shocking.”

On the defensive, Washington argued such intrusive digital eavesdropping was necessary with jihadists around every corner. Playing the terrorism card evokes disdain from Greenwald. “The risk of any American dying in a terrorist attack is infinitesimal, considerably less than being struck by lightening.”

Before Snowden’s fearless act of political defiance went “live,” he confided to Greenwald that his one concern was that no one would care. That decidedly proved not to be the case. Whether you think of him as a traitor, or a patriot, there’s no question that Snowden has put the dangers inherent in over-zealous state surveillance at the centre of the public conversation, globally.

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